Portfolio Review

This is something I've wanted to do for a while, do a sort of accountability checkin on some of the more interesting portfolios we've played around with in previous blog posts.

Here's the first batch.

Obviously the Insane Portfolio is not a serious thing but it still makes a point about exchanges being a partial proxy for broad indexes....I think that's the case anyway. The portfolio gets a lot of return for having a low weighting to equities which speaks to the idea of barbelling. The volatility looks pretty good too. 

The context for the new variation of the permanent portfolio was a blog post about the Wavefront All Weather Alternative Portfolio which trades in Canada. The weightings are true to the ETF from back then. Since the blog post Wavefront has had a fairly smooth ride to a 2.6% gain versus 12% for the one we concocted. The large weighting to managed futures did a lot of heavy lifting for the portfolio.

The Quadrant Inspired looks like a follow up post that includes a couple of different versions. Comparing it to the Permanent Portfolio Mutual Fund (PRPFX) back to last July, PRPFX shows up 13.2% but is down about 6% from it's high which is not too bad. Quadrant inspired was up 5% since I wrote the post but has had a remarkably smooth ride. It's down less than 1% this month.

The last one for today is this post is from January where we equal weighted based on excess kurtosis and standard deviation. Two and half months isn't much of a sample but we've had a good test this month and it looks decent, down a little over 3% through Friday.

I'll circle back on a few more soon. For now the only that really didn't seem to do as well as the others was an attempt to mimic Bob Elliott's Simple Game Plan. The returns were a little lower and the volatility was a little higher. It was not catastrophic by any means just not great.

The practical takeaway from these exercises is about tweaking portfolios slightly to improve results. Managed futures did well in 2025 but putting 20% into the strategy is way too high for real life no matter how well it backtests. A lot of success from these can be attributed to avoiding bonds with duration which makes an important point. Knowing what to avoid is arguably just as important as knowing what to include. 

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